


Cold Frame

by laliquey



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alaska, Father-Son Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 09:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6280000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laliquey/pseuds/laliquey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young Rust gets a summer job and a plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Frame

_It's not real._

 

The weight of sleep was still too much but Rust fought it, tried to kick the nightmare off with bowed legs that hurt all the way up into his shoulder blades.

 

_Wake the fuck up and it'll stop.  
_

 

_This isn't real.  
_

 

A sharp lungful of air rushed in as he opened his eyes, the dream knocked from his head but still nearby as he patted the rough wool blanket to make sure his legs were still straight. They were, and he lay back down, relieved that it was over and that pop hadn't heard.

He'd asked for this, in a way. The antiquated textbooks in Sophomore health class had loads of color plates that were deeply interesting by day but followed him into the night, inciting a series of rickets nightmares where his bones softened into hideous, painful shapes. He researched it further and was sure it was a premonition; he got a little carton of milk every day at school, but pop wouldn't buy any for home operating under his usual tenet of "Shit's expensive."

There was another way to get vitamin D, and Rust concluded that the cure for many of his problems, both real and imaginary, was sunlight.

*

He brought it up the day they dug out their south-facing cold frames, the low little in-ground greenhouses pop built so long ago Rust didn't remember him doing it. The snow covering them was heavy and wet, not the powdery dry it had been a month ago when a mere inhale pinched the inside of his nose with frost.

"I was thinking," he said, wiping a thick layer of white off the Lucite top with his forearm. "That I might wanna go where it's nicer and there's more sun. Maybe live with nana and finish out school down there."

Pop didn't speak for a whole minute as empty as the dirt in their frames. "You romanticize that leg of the family without even knowin' 'em," he said, prying a frame open and letting the door shut with a bang. "The Lower 48's a Soddom and Gomorrah of brick and plastic. Ain't nobody down there you need to see, ain't nothing down there you need and if you go I promise you'll be back here in a month and mad at yourself that you went."

Rust looked down into the blankness of the snow, mad at himself for not expecting such an answer or working up a decent response for it.

"When we build for you, you're gonna get so much sun in that clearing you could grow tropical flowers if you wanted to. Big gaudy purple ones."

Rust ignored the sarcasm and kept working. Pop's plan - and his, for lack of a better one, was to someday build him a house on a section of their acreage he'd chosen when he was eight years old. Since then, the wish list for his future home changed often except for one thing: a loft. He never stopped wanting that, all the heat collecting into a little triangle up top where he could read and sleep and dream. But then school taught him that a good percentage of the world was as warm as a loft all the time.

"I'm just sick a' bein' cold, I guess."

"Cold's good for you. 'Sides that, up here you won't ever see a spider the size of a grown man's hand. Or a stick bug the size of an actual fuckin' stick."

All that shit was in Vietnam, not Texas, but Rust kept his mouth shut. There was no arguing with pop about bugs.

They continued without word until all four frames were uncovered and pop stood to recite his annual bullshit. "You've got smaller hands and more patience so I guess you get the honors," he said, producing the homemade packet of last year's lettuce seeds from a pocket. Teasing the tiny seed flakes from their pods had also been Rust's job, and even then he doubted the smaller hands excuse was still true.

"Make sure you space 'em out right, too. Leave room for succession plants so we don't have a whole season of the same goddamn thing."

"You say it like it's ever happened," Rust muttered, and Travis went inside - to drink, probably - leaving Rust to scratch his yearly lines in the dirt.

It hadn't always been this way. When he was little pop was patient, teaching him pine cone math and singing the song on his birthday, but as he grew older a strange resentment crept in, alongside dark reminisces about days when Rust was cuter and listened better. Maybe it was tied to the vague sickness cited by the big VA hospital up north, but still; he couldn't possibly expect or want this one room shack father-son acrimony to go on a minute longer than it had to. Did he really expect him to grow up but stay close by? It seemed so, but why?

Aside from the early amity of dependence, they never really liked each other.

*

The first wave of lettuce came in thick and crisp, and when it got warm enough to start string beans, Rust started thinking about a summer job.

Snowpack was low for the entire state making summer wildfires a sure thing; come July, white cinders would light on his clothes and sunsets would become a borealis opposite like the yawns of hell. Seasonal firefighting paychecks were legendary and he wanted one, even just to sit on it and enjoy having all that coiled up power.

He quit shaving the last month of school so he might look closer to eighteen than the sixteen he actually was and never mentioned his plans. Travis was headed to his summer camp for a few weeks anyway, the mysterious trespass on Federal land that Rust didn't even know the location of. Pop's need to take an annual break from his company didn't offend him because he'd grown to need it, too.

An hour after pop took off Rust doused their vegetables with water and hitched a ride to Anchorage for the test. He easily ticked a lot of boxes on the written section he suspected others couldn't.

Yes he could work a chainsaw.

Yes he could drop a snag in any direction, no matter which way it leaned.

Yes he could survive a week out equipped with next to nothing.

The DOF definition of "nothing" was a lot different than his, and the pack test was a fucking joke - 45 pounds, 3 miles, under 45 minutes. Packs were designed to be carried by men. Dripping buck quarters less so, and he was back so fast he found the test proctor wrist-deep in nosepicking because he didn't expect anyone back soon enough to catch him.

Rust accepted his congratulations without handshake and knew he was on the brink of something good.

*

His certificate arrived at the Happy Valley post office and dry lightning strikes came a day later, as if in answer to his terrible, selfish wish. He left pop a vague note about his absence being work-related and got shipped towards the fire in a rattling retired school bus that picked up other new recruits along the way. He looked them all over and concluded they weren't shy, like him. They were scared.

The first day on the fire was unforgettable. Wind caused an already bad situation to blow up into something Biblically terrible and a flood of insects and birds and animals rushed past him, a warped ark pilgrimage on their way out to safety. Something deep and primitive made him want to follow but he stayed put and dug fireline until the roots of his arms ached.

Long-lit July days passed in a thick blur tinted like an old sepia photograph. The second best part of any given day was curling up in his tiny dome tent for a headlong plunge into sleep. The _best_ part of any day was fighting the fire. It was a formidable foe, making things like Travis and Texas and even his very future seem small and ridiculous. It was fucking _enormous._ It went where it wanted with raucous, reckless spirit and didn't care what got mowed down.

It had qualities Rust admired and hoped to make his own someday.

Once, on purpose, he got too close and sealed himself against the ground under the silver blanket from his pack, cringing and grinning as the flames licked his back. It was like touching something forbidden and divine and he imagined a sort of mutual respect forged between them...it could've heated the air enough to cook his lungs, or it could've elbowed in to toast him directly. But it didn't. When he emerged, unhurt, he felt part of an unholy fraternity and felt others might be able to sense his new status, too.

Later, back at the mess tent, someone bumped his elbow as he dipped into the vat of runny baked beans. "Hey, Tater."

"Huh?"

"Heard you deployed your shelter. Some of the guys saw you and said you looked like onnea them foil-wrapped taters like in a fancy restaurant. 'Course the nickname only fits 'cause you're still alive. It wouldn't be funny if you hadn't."

"I guess not," Rust said, and was suddenly answering questions about what the heat felt like and whether it was hard to breathe. It had been hot but in a good way, like a column of red down his throat.

After the baked potato incident, he not only had a nickname, he had friends. He found himself in tents that weren't his sometimes, talking about plans for his wages and stuff that may or may not have happened with girls; he also learned that everyone hated their own pop, a little, but his had risen to a higher level of deserving it. He even tried smoking and bummed his first cigarette back on the gravel truck turnaround, the only place inflammable enough to allow it.

"My pop's crazy," Rust told one of his new friends. "For real. Thinks we're headed for a Malthusian population explosion and Alaska's one of the last safe places. For a while, anyhow."

"Mal-what?"

"He thinks there's too many people and there's only gonna be more and society'll degenerate into a lawless state." He took a long drag and exhaled tiredly like he'd been doing it all his life. "So his solution was to bury metal drums full of dried beans and rice and guns all over hell."

"No shit."

"Uh huh. So a while back we dug one of 'em up 'cause he thought he buried a sentimental M16 in it and he wanted to trade it out for a new Winchester he didn't care about as much. The inside was all wet and the beans smelled like shit - and I don't mean bad, I mean they smelled like actual shit, and for three days my pop screamed into that fuckin' hole. He thought bugs did it to be assholes."

His new friend laughed and Rust shrugged cooly. Pop had only screamed for about an hour, but that weakened the story. "I got about a thousand more just like that. He's fuckin' nuts."

"Sounds like you need to get away from him."

"Yeah," Rust agreed, pulling the distant cousin of the fire down inside him. "I do."

*

At the dirty-gray dawn of his tenth day, Rust added up a rough tally of his wages and decided he'd do it again next summer and start saving up for a real house. Plumbed, with electricity, though sometimes the idea of being surrounded by a web of hidden wires creeped him out. But then...he never thought about it at school, with its lights and running water and glorious hot lunch. Maybe he could even turn pop around, fix up his house and show him that life didn't have to be half as hard as he was making it.

This would all probably cost a fortune, and another of his selfish wishes - for overtime with hazard pay - came true when a fierce wind helped the fire jump the line and tear through the west side of the ridge, swallowing Rust and the others in two weeks of relentless sweat, the kind of mess Gold Bond powder couldn't help. The standard issue yellow Nomex shirts, impossibly bright when clean, became no color and there was no time to joke, smoke, or even sleep.

Smoke billowed so thick the boundaries became harder to find and there was talk of backing up, letting it rage because their efforts were becoming tantamount to spitting on a volcano.

And then a heavy Canadian rain rolled in and snuffed it out. The boys went home, no drama or triumph, just sooty clothes and noses packed with black, heavier wallets than when they'd started but so goddamn tired.

Rust was disappointed it was over but excited to get home and tell pop. He'd have to be proud at how he'd passed for older, done serious man's work and made real money doing it. For being so bent on escaping convention and convenience, pop liked when money found its way into his hands and yeah, maybe it came from the government but it was so much more than they'd ever seen. Rust wasn't old enough to treat him to a bottle of good whiskey, but he had cash handy in his front pocket so pop could go buy it himself.

He was at the table, sandpaper-scuffing spinach seeds in an old pie tin to make them germinate faster.

"Hey, pop," Rust said. "You get my note?"

"Uh huh," he answered gruffly. "I got quite a few cubic feet of dead vegetables, too."

_Fuck._

"Oh. Um...I got on a fire crew."

"Huh." So this was how he was going to be. Didn't ask, maybe didn't even care.

The discomfort made Rust talk more, a technique he would use to great effect later as the insecure will always fill silence. "It was the Nenana Ridge fire. You know those bad southern winds off the Alaska Range? We had it seventy percent contained and then it just blew up, burned fifty thousand acres and jumped our fire line but we built another one. It was like...a wall of red. Like it was alive."

"Imagine it was hot." The tired old blue eyes assessed him. "You must've liked that _."_

"Yeah, well...I didn't mind the work and our superintendent thought I'd make a good smokejumper. Said he'd write me a letter of recommendation if I ever want to get in the program. I guess it's sort of...elite."

Pop said nothing. It was almost like he hadn't heard.

"So anyway, we got the fire put out."

"Huh. That's too bad."

The cryptic words revealed nothing, so Rust tried the money angle to impress him. "I made almost a thousand dollars."

"Good for you, but think what you ruined."

"You mean the stuff in the frames? 'Cause I can replace that. I'll buy whatev-"

"I meant the stuff you saved. Shit's meant to burn." He paused to enjoy Rust's confusion a moment. "The next wildfire rolls through's got ten times the fuel thanks to all the dead snags and dry brush you saved. I wouldn't be so proud of that."

Rust's mouth went dry because he couldn't fucking win. Not now, not ever, and pop's smug asshole routine only made it worse.

"Don't pout, now, there ain't no softhearted granny here to see it or care. I'm stating facts, Rust. Just trying to educate you in ways the western world won't."

Rust set his jaw hard and retreated to his corner of the cabin, quietly fishing out a brown paper bag from under his bed. It held stiff, clean jeans folded into a square, spare clothes, and all the things he loved. Favorite books, a stretched-out Fair Isle sweater of mom's, a chunk of jade, and his knife.

"Truth hurts when it's supposed to, don't it?" Travis taunted, and Rust stepped submissively around their crooked handmade table and took a horrible warm slug of Tlingit molasses rotgut.

"Drinkin' like a big man, are we?" he said, and followed Rust as far as the doorway. "Where exactly do you think you're going?"

"Don't matter, 'long as it's nowhere near your worthless ass."

"Rustin, stop," Travis said, and Rust did, for one of the last looks he'd ever have. "I taught you every goddamn thing you need to know in this world. You're smarter than this. Goddammit, you're better than this."

"No I'm not. And I know you're sick but it don't mean you gotta be so damn mean to me all the time."

For once he didn't argue what "sick" meant or bark that VA doctors were neo-fascists stuck on the government teat. His stance even softened, and for a second he almost looked like his old self. "But you can't leave. You're my A-gunner."

"Huh," Rust said. "I thought I was your biggest mistake."

Pained disappointment flared in his face and Rust knew that he knew.

 

_Nana._

_The Lower 48._

_Anywhere but here._

 

It hung there a moment and pop's eyes hardened up like a January lake, cold as the steely silver starting to thread through his hair.

"You have no loyalty."

"Uh huh." Rust reached into his pocket and flipped the twenty dollar bill his direction. "Get yourself a bottle of somethin' decent and drink up, 'cause after that, you got nothing."

He turned and walked toward the road, tingly and terrified and proud while pop hollered something about whooping his ass when he came back.

Rust kept walking and knew what he'd spend the rest of the money on.

A plane ticket out.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for clicking! 
> 
> [Mother The Mountain](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1436623) by badwips has greatly influenced my headcanon re: young!Rust, and a few details from it made it into this fic. <3


End file.
